Tide of emotions

Damian and his mother have attended every SFA event since then, and will be at the 10th annual edition of what is now a free, threeday beach festival, April 21-23, that fills the sand on the north side of the pier with live bands, food trucks and surfing-related vendors. Admission is still free, as are the surfing sessions for kids on the autism spectrum. The not-for-profit SFA will accept donations at the festival.

The idea that began in Deerfield Beach a decade ago has grown into a series of SFA festivals around the state, as well as one in Georgia. The Deerfield event caps registration at 200 surfers, and slots sometimes are filled in a matter of minutes, with participants coming from up and down the East Coast.

The highlight of the weekend is 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, when kids at different points on the autism spectrum take to the waves with SFA volunteers.

One such volunteer, longtime surfer Dave Rossman, arrived at his first Surfers for Autism event in 2009 with preconceived ideas about the limitations of the kids with whom he’d be working. It took about 15 minutes in the water for these kids to remind Rossman of the special relationship surfers have with the rhythm of the ocean, an idea even he may have taken for granted.

“Seeing them for the first time stand up on a wave, to grasp the ocean like a lot of people just never will in their life, I realized right then that everything I thought [about autism] was wrong,” he says.

Emotions run high on the beach during the Saturday surf sessions, especially among parents sending their children into the waves for the first time. Rossman says many parents, after years of being lectured about the things their children can’t do, typically want to accompany their child into the water. They are turned back by SFA volunteers in an act that Rossman, the father of two boys, acknowledges takes extraordinary trust.

“Once that kid catches that first wave, invariably you can’t tell a child with autism from one not on the spectrum,” he says.

The crowd of parents on the beach is typically an ebb and flow of relief and tears.

“I can’t speak too long without having them come up myself,” Rossman says. “There’s so much emotion that goes from outright terror and fear to the instant when everything just kind of comes out, and it becomes weeping.”